Dandelion Community Service

[GENERAL] Summarize your solution to the problem.

Keep the existing Dandelion Community Service, which has been serving the community for 21 months now, running for at least another 6 months.

[GENERAL] Summarize your relevant experience.

DevOps advocate with over 15 years of experience. Ex-Emurgo DevOps Lead. Gimbalabs Co-Founder. Dandelion Founder, Developer and Operator.

[IMPACT] Please describe your proposed solution.

Dandelion Community Service has been serving our ecosystem for close to 2 years now, helping developers to prototype and bootstrap new projects (check this previously funded proposal for an *in*complete list), helping to drive Cardano adoption.

We propose to maintain the free community service that have served hundreds of thousands of requests every month for our community, and to carry on making contributions to the OpenSource projects that make it possible: kustomize-dandelion [0] and ansible-dandelion [1] among some others [2].

[1] https://gitlab.com/gimbalabs/dandelion/kustomize-dandelion

[2] https://gitlab.com/gimbalabs/dandelion/ansible-dandelion

[3] https://gitlab.com/gimbalabs/dandelion

[IMPACT] Please describe how your proposed solution will address the Challenge that you have submitted it in.

We think Dandelion Community Service has proven to enrich the Cardano developer ecosystem and literally aligns with the answer for the "Why is it important?" question for this callenge:

It creates an awesome experience that incentives developers, that lead to increased developer adoption, productivity, and creativity by providing a ready-to-go environment to build on Cardano.

[IMPACT] What are the main risks that could prevent you from delivering the project successfully and please explain how you will mitigate each risk?

At this point, we think there won't be any risk that prevents us to keep the current service running for some more time :)

[FEASIBILITY] Please provide a detailed plan, including timeline and key milestones for delivering your proposal.

The plan is to just keep the service running and to align the development of the OpenSource projects with the needs of this other proposal that aims to extend the community service with a production-ready decentralized network of Dandelion deployments.

Roadmap:

1st-6th month:

- Keep the uptime of the community nodes as high as possible. 

- Keep maintaing the OpenSource projects up to date with new service updates

[FEASIBILITY] Please provide a detailed budget breakdown.

• Infrastructure costs to maintain the current 3 locations including some development environments (3x deploys at $300/mo x6 months: $5400)

• 2x Systems administrator/DevOps profile that takes care of the maintenance of the deployments and the updates to the OpenSource project ($1500/mo x6 months x2 people: $18000)

Total budget: $23400

[FEASIBILITY] Please provide details of the people who will work on the project.

Currently the community service is run by these two operators:

• Roberto C. Morano (PEACE stakepool operator)
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rcmorano/
• Tom (RSV stakepool operator)
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/RSVNODE

[FEASIBILITY] If you are funded, will you return to Catalyst in a later round for further funding? Please explain why / why not.

Probably yes. This community service closes a feedback loop by allowing projects to build on Cardano, which leads to more transaction fees to be collected, feeding back Catalyst treasury; so we think it can be sustained this way.

[FEASIBILITY] Are you or any member of your team working on any other proposals in this Fund9?

[FEASIBILITY] Are you or your team working on any other proposals from previous Funds?

[AUDITABILITY] Please describe what you will measure to track your project's progress, and how will you measure these?

Key Performance Indicators (KPIs):

• Number of requests per month

• Number of new projects on boarded (difficult to track tho)

[AUDITABILITY] What does success for this project look like?

It would be a success to be able to provide the service to our community of developers forever and ever!

[AUDITABILITY] Please provide information on whether this proposal is a continuation of a previously funded project in Catalyst or an entirely new one.

This is an extension for the service funded by these proposals:

• Fund2 proposal: https://cardano.ideascale.com/c/idea/322195
• Fund5 proposal: https://cardano.ideascale.com/c/idea/352562
• Fund7 proposal: https://cardano.ideascale.com/c/idea/385065

Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) Rating

#8, 9, 17